“She has to get out of there. She’s pregnant.” Doctor Mustafa Barghouti communicates by mobile phone with a Palestinian health worker held by the Israeli army in the southern West Bank. “We are surrounded by 1,100 checkpoints and 200 security gates that isolate communities and turn them into cages,” he explains at the Ramallah headquarters of the Palestinian National Initiative, the party he founded more than two decades ago with intellectual Edward Said. A former minister and parliamentarian, Barghouti, at 71, remains one of the most respected independent voices among Palestinians. “Things like this happen every day,” he recounts, “and during the war with Iran, everything has gotten worse: we haven’t been a party to it, but we have been victims.”
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Israel has taken advantage of the conflict with Tehran to extend its control over large areas assigned to the Palestinian Authority in the 1993 Oslo Accords, while settler aggressions multiplied. Palestinians have suffered the consequences of a war in which four young women died from the impact of an Iranian projectile, and more than a dozen civilians have died in attacks by settlers and Israeli soldiers.
“Israel only has an occupation plan, not a peace plan,” argues Barghouti, who is forbidden from setting foot in his native Jerusalem, located half an hour’s drive from Ramallah. “It has already killed the two-state solution; there is no future for a Palestinian state, but we will never leave our land.”
The Israeli NGO B’Tselem has confirmed that a Palestinian was shot in the back a week ago by a settler mobilized by the army as a reservist in the village of Deir Yarir, north of Ramallah. They stormed the pastures surrounding the village with herds before opening fire with their weapons.
The West Bank has not recovered since the pandemic in 2020. The Gaza war, starting in October 2023, and the latest conflict with Iran have only exacerbated a crisis that has plunged the daily lives of Palestinians “into survival mode,” warns Yusef Mohamad, 38, an economist at the Bank of Palestine.
Forgotten by the world, nearly 250,000 Palestinian workers have been unable to go to their jobs in Israel for more than two years. As many other civil servants and public employees, such as teachers and health workers, have seen their salaries reduced by 50%. “Only Palestinian doctors are authorized to go to Israeli hospitals, sometimes to save the lives of soldiers who have killed civilians in Gaza or the West Bank,” he explains.
“The latest conflict has been devastating; the Palestinian Authority is on the verge of collapse. It’s hard to understand how it’s still standing,” says economist Mohamad. Last week, nearly 70 Palestinian workers were discovered by Israeli security forces crammed inside a garbage truck as they tried to cross clandestinely into Israel through a border crossing in the central West Bank.
Khaled, 49, worked in construction in Israel before the outbreak of the Gaza war in 2023. “I had a good salary, but since then my economic situation has plummeted,” he reveals in Ramallah. “I can no longer help my family as before, and give my five children what they need. One of my daughters is studying medicine at university. I can’t continue helping her with expenses, and that breaks my heart,” he confesses. “When the war in Gaza ended, I trusted that things would change. But they have imposed another war on us that has ended all hope.”
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“As long as Israeli attacks in Gaza continue, which happen daily, reconstruction cannot be considered. For Palestinians, it is an endless war,” concludes the Bank of Palestine economist. The trickle of deaths in the Strip does not cease. Five people died on Monday the 13th in Israeli army incursions. Two days earlier, bombings caused at least seven deaths. On Thursday, four were counted. On Friday, there were two fatalities. On Saturday, two truck drivers transporting drinking water for a UN agency were shot dead. More than 770 Palestinians have lost their lives in Gaza in Israeli attacks since the start of the ceasefire in the enclave on October 10.
The Peace Board created by US President Donald Trump after the cessation of hostilities intends to take steps this month to impose the disarmament of the Islamist militia Hamas, without guaranteeing in return the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the coastal enclave. The reconstruction process remains blocked in the meantime, and basic supplies still do not reach a population of two million inhabitants, while the risk of the war in Gaza reactivating increases.
Doctors Without Borders defines daily life in Gaza as “catastrophic” after six months of a nominal ceasefire. “There is a continuous and deliberate pattern of aid blockade, with shortages of drinking water and food, and no access to healthcare, while Israel prevents the entry of medical supplies and the evacuation of seriously ill patients,” denounces this international NGO. 90% of the population has been forcibly displaced, concentrated in 42% of the territory within the so-called “yellow line” drawn west of the Strip by the army, which has become a lethal barrier for anyone approaching it.
“We don’t know what a ceasefire is in Gaza. But without regional peace, there can be none in Palestine either,” says Abdelfatah Doleh, 47, spokesperson for the Fatah party, led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in Ramallah. “We hope the world will now turn its attention to us and that the Palestinian issue will once again be on the international agenda,” Doleh pleads. “The almost general silence of the international community during more than two years of wars has shown that punishing Israel’s crimes is not on the global agenda.”
34 new settlements
The de facto annexation of the West Bank advances while Israeli Finance Minister, the ultranationalist Bezalel Smotrich, boasts that his government is “killing the idea of a Palestinian state.” Israel has just approved the construction or consolidation of 34 settlements in the West Bank, despite the international community considering them illegal. The UN Security Council last ratified this in December 2016, in resolution 2334 adopted under the mandate of Democrat Barack Obama in the US. During the presidencies of Republican Donald Trump, more than a hundred settlements have emerged.
“Palestinians have been abandoned by the world,” denounces Nedaa, 28, an employee of the Palestinian Administration in Ramallah. “So many consecutive wars worsen our vulnerability. We have been under double pressure: the Israeli occupation and Iranian missiles, and here we have no shelters.” In the midst of the war, the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, has approved the imposition of the death penalty only for Palestinians by the military courts that judge them in the West Bank. For Israelis living in the same territory, judged by civilian courts, capital punishment is not applicable.
“The conflict with Iran has been an Israeli war, not a Palestinian one, but everything that happens in the Middle East affects us,” states political analyst Fares Sarafandi. “The war continues in Gaza, and Israel has turned the West Bank into a large open-air prison.” This commentator on a Palestinian television channel, who has spent three of his 42 years in Israeli prisons, agrees that the Jewish state “will never allow a Palestinian state.” “Ethnic cleansing is underway. There is no future for Palestinians,” he concludes. “We are alone. No one has stopped the genocide in Gaza.”
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